They were welcomed in Leopoldville by an old friend of the Duke’s. Marcus had forgotten his name, but he had a clear memory of the evening they spent together. The man was a high official of an import–export company who lived in a house of green wood, with mosquito nets on the doors, windows and beds. After dinner all four of them sat in wicker armchairs. The host gave them cigars and French cognac. He didn’t make any class distinctions and Marcus was able to enjoy the same pleasures as the other men.
Their host expressed his doubts about William and Richard’s venture. He said that the ivory was becoming scarce, that the rubber was a government monopoly, and that finding a mine deep in the Congo would be a stroke of luck as improbable as a lost ant finding an oasis in the Sahara. He added that William and Richard were nothing more than a couple of amateurs, and that the Congo was the most savage place in the world. But he said it all in such a cordial and funny way, that even the Craver brothers, as insulted as they may have felt, laughed heartily. He also said that the ‘niggers’ were the worst workers in existence, lazier than the Latins, more shifty than the Arabs, and stupider than the Chinese.
‘Treat them without ceremony and with forceful methods,’ he recommended between the smoke rings that came out of his mouth. ‘It’s the only language they understand.’
The house wasn’t very big, with no extra bedrooms, and Marcus anticipated spending the night with the servants. The man dismissed the idea with a guffaw.
‘No. That’s unthinkable. White people don’t sleep with Negroes.’
‘I don’t mind,’ murmured Marcus, who didn’t want to cause any problems. But that was what made the man raise his voice in a very unpleasant tone.
‘Well, I do, my friend, I definitely do mind! If I allowed that, the entire European community in Leopoldville would incriminate me, and rightly so. A European can’t mix with Africans. In this life, everyone has their place, and they have to stay there.’
That created a problem. Today it’s hard to believe that our formalities were so strict, but in 1912 it was unthinkable that the Craver brothers spend the night with someone like Marcus. It was one thing to share tobacco and a cognac with a servant, and quite another to share a room. But Marcus couldn’t sleep with the Negro servants of the house either. There was a moment of hesitation. Finally, three of the servants accompanied him to a guesthouse at the port, poor but respectable and very clean, which was frequented by sailors and European staff of inferior rank.
First thing the following day, Marcus had to return to the house to meet with the Craver brothers. We’ll have to forgive him the bewilderment he suffered. Marcus was unfamiliar with that phenomenon so often spoken of by travellers. They say that Africa shows us that in England everything is more tenuous, more trivial, as if we Northerners lived with ghost feelings, apathetic and mollified, uncultivated. On the other hand, the Congo amplified the world’s power. The light didn’t fall from the sky, it came from every side. The smells were fetid or splendid, nothing in between. The mouths spoke a language of bubbles.
The streets were filled with Negro men, women and children. He never would have thought there could be so many Negroes in the world. And he realised that a lot of them were looking at him as if he were the oddity. Suddenly he noticed that, as crowded as those red dirt streets were, no one ever bumped into him. They kept their distance, as if he were a leper. Why? He collided with a woman.
I remember that Marcus sat in front of me, at our rectangular table. He raised his handcuffed hands above his head.
‘You could never imagine, Mr Thomson, the amount of things that Negro women can carry on their heads!’
The woman hadn’t seen Marcus. Her bundle of firewood lay scattered on the ground. Marcus acted as any civilised person would: he bent down to pick up the firewood, feeling ashamed at having caused the incident.
‘Excuse me a thousand times over, madam!’ he proclaimed. ‘I’ll carry the wood to wherever you say. Forgive me, forgive me …’
But the silence made him forget about the firewood. He was surrounded by perhaps more than a hundred people, all silent. They couldn’t understand what he was doing there, in the middle of the street. But above all they couldn’t understand what a white man was doing stooped down and gathering a Negro woman’s firewood. He looked at the woman. What he saw in her face wasn’t indignation. It was terror.
The stay at Leopoldville extended longer than had been anticipated. Even to Marcus it was obvious that William and Richard were doing something more than enjoying the hospitality of their father’s friend. The three men met frequently so that the new arrivals could learn the rudiments of life in the Congo. Since Marcus was excluded, the days dragged for him. So he was very happy when the expedition prepared to set off, fifteen days later.
That same day they introduced him to Godefroide, a thickset Negro man, as tough as a crab. His bones seemed twice as thick as normal. He wore short trousers and you could see that he had the brawny thighs of a wild boar. He wore a cylindrical, Turkish- style hat. His face was lined with fissures, very similar to the ones seen on soil that has endured a long drought. But the cracks followed an intelligent geometry, as if an iron spider’s web had become encrusted on his face. He came recommended by a friend of the Duke. He didn’t talk much.
‘And the mules?’ asked Marcus.
William made a vague gesture with his hand. Marcus saw a hundred Negro men beside the bundles. They only wore long underpants. They sat apathetically, squatting like frogs with their elbows over their knees, waiting for someone to give them marching orders.
‘Bearers are in short supply,’ said William. ‘It took all of my father’s friend’s influence to be able to recruit them.’
I would never have thought that the jungle would be so close to the city. Two hours after they set off, there was no visible sign of human life. Leopoldville could have been right behind them, or very, very far away. The jungle had swallowed them up.
I’ll skip the detailed account of their march through the jungle. Stanley has already described it quite well when he baptised it the ‘green hell.’ However, I will note, that exoticism and monotony can co-exist very well. The first twenty days they didn’t report anything new. They advanced all day long in an extended row of humans. Since the path was so narrow and there was a very dense ceiling of vegetation above their heads, it was as if they were travelling through a tunnel. In certain spots the verdure was an impenetrable shield, and in others it became a sword that wounded everything it touched. The plants prevented any natural light from reaching the ground, so there was little difference between the days and the nights. At the end of each day, the expedition camped in any clearing, and first thing in the morning they set off again. Every day was the same.
William wore white, as always. White pith helmet, white shirt, white trousers. The only exception was the high black boots that made his figure even more svelte. Richard wore a khaki uniform and a wide-brimmed Australian hat. A thin ribbon of white fabric hung from the hat down his entire back, a precaution against the strong sun. At that time it was believed that the tropical sun ate away at the European spine. Each man’s weapon matched its owner’s body. William carried a light Winchester repeating rifle, Richard an enormous shotgun that according to the manufacturer’s advertising could fell an adult elephant with one shot. When the ceiling of the vegetation allowed it, William and Richard travelled in portable chairs, borne by four bearers, similar to the ancient Romans’ sedan chairs. And Marcus? Were his little legs built to withstand exhausting marches in such a hostile environment? Against all expectations, yes. Ducks have short legs too and they are great swimmers. With Marcus it was something similar. His workman’s cap was enough to protect him from the heat. He rolled up the sleeves of a light linen shirt, on top of which were only the leather braces attached to his trousers. His worker’s boots seemed to have been made to walk through the jungle. Moving among trees filled him with a new vigour, as if the jungle was his natural environment.
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The trees. Godefroide taught him many things. It was him who explained to Marcus that the thunder they heard on their march wasn’t actually thunder. Every once in a while a long boom would erupt, a cannon shot that ripped through the earth. But it wasn’t the prelude to any flood.
‘That’s not thunder,’ explained Godefroide impassively. ‘Those are large trees dying. They fall and the sound spreads throughout the entire jungle, far, far away.’
There were trees whose trunks had thorns larger than bayonets and wider than axes. There were trees with iron bark and trees with velvet creases. Some projected their roots along the path, and blocked their way with a wooden barricade they either had to jump or climb over. And there were also killer trees, that grew up around other ones, coiling around them just like a snake. On many stretches of that tunnel of vegetation the atmosphere was so dense, the air so short of oxygen, that men suffocated. It was like breathing hot gas. The column had no choice but to speed up and hold their breath, as if they were underwater and trying to make it to the surface before drowning.
And the noise. A sort of uninterrupted whirling buzz with deep tones superimposed. The jungle might raise the volume at any moment, slowly, imperceptibly, constantly. Sometimes the sound’s insistence made men drunk with fake energy and, as if they were spurred on by the drum that marked galley slaves’ pace, they covered ten miles with the effort of only one. Other times, the sound passed through their clothes and their flesh and turned their bones into steam.
William’s fair eyes made him suffer. In the Congo, the light has no gradation. Within the jungle, days were green darkness: the leafy ceilings sealed off the sun. Then, suddenly, the caravan would enter a clearing. There the sun would burst through in full force. Opaque darkness and then blinding light. The contrast hurt those delicate grey pupils.
William had always been an artist of cold violence. Now the excess of light provoked in him attacks of hot-bloodedness. On one occasion he directed his discomfort at Marcus. This was how it went.
One day, during the break for lunch, the bearers were ordered to open some boxes. They pulled chains and stocks from them. If they wanted to eat, they had to put the stocks on their necks. Godefroide translated William’s words.
‘Every day there are more disturbances around the pot. From now on you’ll queue up like this. No more pushing.’
The men were hungry and they obeyed. A few moments later Godefroide and Marcus distributed the food to a row of one hundred shackled men. Each neck was attached to the next one and the previous one, no one escaped the irons. William approached the large pot where Godefroide filled the wooden bowls. William blinked, his eyes smarting in the intense light of the Congo. He scolded him, yelling, ‘What are you, Marcus? A kitchen hand or a French chef?’
It was easy to imagine Marcus, moving his head from right to left, looking at the pot and the wooden bowls, not understanding what William was talking about.
‘Save food!’ he clarified.
Marcus looked at the row of men, each one similar to the next like one hundred sardines.
‘But they’re very weak,’ said Marcus. ‘They carry forty pounds all day long.’
‘Do what you’re told, halfwit!’ shouted William. And before turning to leave he spat out, ‘This isn’t a picnic!’
They spent the rest of the day in the clearing. But after the meal no one took the stocks off of their necks. Drenched in sweat, William and Richard smoked, seated in folding chairs some distance away. They didn’t say anything, they didn’t do anything. They acted as if the Negro men had been chained up since day one. The strangest thing of all was that the bearers didn’t complain. One, only one, made a gesture, picking up the chain with one hand and showing it timidly to the white men. But William and Richard just kept smoking. The one who held the chain up looked around him. No one seconded him and he let it go.
Marcus didn’t understand it. The men had let themselves be chained up without offering any resistance. Why? For a bit of millet soup. They didn’t protest, they didn’t demand that the chains be taken off. They lay there apathetically like a flock of sheep. Nothing more.
What ideas went through Marcus’s mind? We don’t know what he thought, only what he did. In the middle of that small clearing there was a tree, only one. It reigned like a sole emperor that keeps the plebeians at a distance. Marcus had never seen anything like it. Compared to that tree, the oak at the Craver mansion was like a blind man’s cane. The base was shaped like a monstrous, open frog’s hand. Lateral planks of wood projected from the trunk, like shark fins, and plunged into the earth. Just one of those planks was larger than a child’s toboggan. Marcus looked up, but the density of the branches kept him from seeing the tree’s peak.
He climbed into the tree. He got up the first few feet thanks to some lianas that fell parallel to the trunk, which were stronger and more secure than iron cords. William and Richard laughed, ‘What are you doing, Marcus? There’s already enough monkeys in the Congo!’
Marcus didn’t answer. He continued going further and further up. Instinctively, he used a technique sailors use when working on the ship’s mast: of his four limbs, hands and feet, he steadied three before moving one. When he had climbed about fifty feet he could no longer see the ground. Further up. He heard William and Richard’s sarcastic voices grow weaker as he climbed. Before he realised it he could no longer hear them, nor any other human sound.
Up there life was nothing like down below. He encountered birds, which were astonished by his presence. He wasn’t afraid of falling. The branches made a wider, safer structure than any scaffolding, no one would have believed he was over one hundred and fifty feet high.
He continued. The trunks were now slimmer. The leaves whipped his face and scratched his hands. Marcus wanted to go a little bit higher, just a bit more.
Finally he stretched out his arm and a small branch broke in his fingers. It was if a skylight opened up: the greenest eyes in Africa met with the bluest sky in the world.
From that natural watchtower he could see a green carpet that extended into infinity. He was so high up that the jungle looked like a layer of moss. But it wasn’t grass, it was trees, trees, trees. Here they rippled, further on they waved and above floated the jungle’s vapour, rising with the density of a cotton fog.
The trees dominated everything. There was no desert, no ocean, no tundra that could compare. And in that moment, at the top of that tree, Marcus knew the world could be a very large place, but that the Congo would always be larger than the world.
Out loud he said, ‘My God, where are we going?’
I think that Marcus sensed the answer: on beyond the grace of God.
FIVE
FIVE DAYS LATER THE bearers started dying off. The process was very simple. When a man fell weak, they tried to revive him by beating him with the butt of a gun. If he didn’t respond, they opened the shackles, left him right there and the caravan continued forward.
Death begat death: the more bearers that died, the more weight the remaining ones had to carry, and so, even more bearers died. But the losses only revealed the Craver brothers’ most inflexible side. During a break Richard surprised a man holding a jar filled with formol. He was looking at the liquid and the beetles that floated in it against the light. He was so fascinated he didn’t realise that Richard was watching him.
‘You opened the luggage!’ shouted Richard angrily. ‘How dare you?’
William came over. After briefly reflecting he gave his judgement. ‘Tomorrow, this man will haul the champagne.’
That night Marcus spoke with Godefroide.
‘Why are they so stupid? They are all tied up, and even so they steal.’
‘He wasn’t trying to steal,’ said Godefroide.
‘No? Then why did he open the trunk?’
‘Out of curiosity.’
‘There were only beetles in the jar.’
‘He didn’t understand what interest the white men could have in some
dead beetles. And for that, now he is the one who’ll die.’
Godefroide spoke little and always expressed himself with artistic ambiguity. Either due to his Bantu syntax or some unique inclination of his personality, it was impossible to know if he was just stating a fact, if he was condemning it or if, just the opposite, that he fully supported the authority that ordained it.
Carrying the champagne was the equivalent of a death sentence. There were sixty pounds of French bottles with thick glass. They couldn’t distribute the load into other boxes, because that one had special cushioning to protect the bottles.
The champagne was like a mark of death. They all knew that the man who carried the champagne would die before the day ended, from total exhaustion. So, at the start of each day the Negro men would try to grab any bundle before that one. There were fights. The result, as logical as it was inevitable, was that the weakest ended up bearing the heaviest load. But William and Richard were pleased with the situation, because it ensured that the bearers made sure to wake up nice and early to avoid that crate.
Here, I’ll interject: I had promised myself that I wouldn’t open my mouth during our sessions unless it was vital. But when I heard about the first deaths I began to suffer a dreadful nervous excitement. Listening to Marcus was like drinking a thousand cups of coffee. My heart beat faster, my veins got wider and torrents of blood ran up and down inside me. Even still, I kept quiet. And I assure you that the effort of maintaining that silence was not healthy at all.
Marcus referred to the victims without any feeling. As if all that carnage was a minor incident. The bearers were human beings. They treated them like dogs, and when they died they left them like dead dogs. But Marcus showed no emotion. I was saying all that to myself, and the word ‘Pepe’ made me open my eyes.